Why Katie Grand is the most-wanted woman in fashion

Friend of Madonna, Stella and Agyness. Editor of the magazine that persuades A-listers to take their clothes off. Katie Grand has come a long way since being a nerdy, weight-obsessed teenager who dreamt of editing Vogue. Lynn Barber meets an icon of cool

Katie Grand recently spent £2,000 on dry-cleaning all her clothes, because she'd found moths in the house. The reason it cost £2,000 to dry-clean her clothes was because she has kept every garment she has ever owned since the age of 15. When her last house was completely submerged in clothes, she started putting some of them in storage ... until she realised she was paying £250 a month in storage fees and that it would be cheaper just to buy a bigger house. So a year ago she bought an enormous house, in Tufnell Park, where she lives with her boyfriend Steve Mackey, bass player with Pulp, two guinea pigs, and her fashion archives. The sitting room is entirely lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves containing bound volumes of Arena, Blitz, Dazed & Confused, Elle, i-D, The Face, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and British, American, Italian and French Vogue. Upstairs, one room is devoted to shoes and handbags, with dozens of matching shoeboxes with photos on the outside, but also great overflowing piles of shoes and boots not yet filed. Then there is the clothes room, which contains 10 rails, tightly hung with at least 500 garments, arranged in alphabetical order, A for Alaia, B for Balenciaga, C for Chanel, but also G for Gap and W for Warehouse because those were some of the first clothes she bought. There is also a rail of vintage clothes (Zandra Rhodes, Ossie Clark) and a whole rail of Prada. But the room is already full, so Grand thinks soon she will have to institute a two-tier system or, of course, buy an even bigger house.

She can afford to do this because she is known in the fashion industry as Katie-Grand-a-Minute. This is an exaggeration, but she admits after a bit of arm-twisting, that she earns £3,000-4,000 a day as a fashion stylist and consultant, and at present works 30-40 days a year for Louis Vuitton, about 30 days for Loewe, and another 30 days for a big Italian name. (She also works about 20 days a year for Giles Deacon but does that for free because he is an old friend.) This is all in addition to her day job, which is editor-in-chief of POP, the drop-dead cool magazine she founded in 2000. But that, she says, pays almost nothing - it takes up 70 per cent of her time, and produces only five per cent of her income.

With this formidable fashion background, I was expecting Katie Grand to be, well, grand, or at least terrifyingly glossy. On the contrary, she seems as fresh and unpolished as a schoolgirl. She wears no make-up, uses no beauty products (not even moisturiser), has frizzy hair and big gaps in her teeth and speaks with a Birmingham accent. She is 37 but seems much younger. She invited me to POP's office in Clerkenwell to meet her 'Popettes' - the editorial assistants who double as models for the magazine - and also Clara who turned out to be the office rabbit. Clara was hopping round the floor eating Ryvita; the Popettes, clad variously in torn jeans, sequined tops and gladiator sandals, were eating Ryvita at their desks. Grand clapped her hands and announced 'editorial meeting' and the Popettes gathered round her, giggling. She said she wanted them to 'think the Queen', and, after more giggling and conferring, they volunteered to go to Buckingham Palace, dressed as members of the Royal Family, and pose with the guardsmen. Then they all broke into song, 'They're changing guards at Buckingham Palace. Christopher Robin went down with Alice' and dashed off. It was the quickest editorial meeting I have ever attended.

Given the playpen atmosphere, it's astonishing that POP ever comes out, let alone that it's as slick, professional and successful as it is. It was launched as a twice-yearly with a print run of 70-80,000 copies. It now comes out three times a year - Grand is hoping to push that to four - and has a circulation of 125,000. With typical modesty, she says it's all thanks to Mark Frith, ex-editor of Heat, giving her good advice on cover lines. But of course the covers are brilliant too. For her first cover she photographed a group of her friends - but they happened to be Stella McCartney, Luella Bartley, Liberty Ross and Phoebe Philo - lounging around in their underwear. Then for the fourth issue Stella McCartney suggested they should have Madonna and rang Madonna who said yes right away. She arrived on time, agreed to everything the POP team suggested, posed for seven hours and parted friends - 'It was the most smooth-running thing we've ever done.' Then Victoria Beckham said she'd like to work with POP and Grand agreed because 'It seemed like the right moment - she was the most famous woman on the planet at the time.' And then she got Kylie, whom she'd worked with for years, and Drew Barrymore, whom she also knew, 'So there was a certain casualness about how it all evolved. Nothing ever felt that uptight.'

But of course it meant that Grand was then on the treadmill of having to find a celebrity for every cover, which introduced her to the horrible business of 'celebrity-wrangling'. She'd never had to do it before, 'and you end up in these great big pickles - one was so bad I was just crying all the time. A friend had instigated a shoot with a big, big Hollywood celebrity, but it was never in writing - and it should have been - that it had to be a cover. So I sent off this email saying, "Really great pix but we've gone with a different cover". And just got the biggest tirade back. The fallout was horrendous and it was a big Hollywood agent who will never work with us again and at the time I was just desperately trying to explain to someone, without sounding like a complete idiot, "I'm really sorry, no one told me how to do this". It was a hard way to learn and now I'm really careful that everything is in writing and we work with an agency for all of our celebrity stuff.'

But, she says, it's still very difficult to predict which covers will sell and which won't. 'Kate Moss was our bestselling issue ever but the Liz Hurley issue - which took a phenomenal amount of work - didn't actually sell that well, although it got tons of press coverage. [They photographed Hurley just six weeks after her baby was born.] So you get a bit caught up in the hype, and then the sales figures come in and you think, "Oh that's a shame!"'

When I met Grand she'd just been to New York for a POP shoot with the art photographer Ryan McGinley and model Agyness Deyn. She'd never worked with McGinley but he said he'd like to photograph Agyness, whom of course Grand knew, and Grand suggested they should do some nudes, because Agyness had never done a nude shoot, and McGinley agreed. 'And then a week later he sent me this reference photograph of kids falling off a fire escape - it was from the 1950s I think - and said he'd really like to have her falling. And naked. So we ended up with two stunt men and Agyness jumping naked from five storeys on to a huge huge crash mat. It was incredible.' Soon afterwards she did a shoot with Grace Jones, who arrived six hours late, but Grand was expecting that - 'We did her for Dazed & Confused about 10 years ago and then she was two days and eight hours late, so we kind of knew what we were getting into. But she was amazing, when she came.' Then Grand flew off to Madrid to do some styling for Loewe, and straight on to Milan for the menswear shows.

She works nonstop - she has only had three weekends off this year. But she likes hard work. She used to be a big drinker in her twenties - 'loud and obnoxious and falling over' - and found, when she stopped drinking in her thirties, that she had so many more hours to fill.

What does Katie Grand have that makes her worth £4,000 a day? She giggles at the question and, typically, deflects it with a joke. 'I've got a great collection of CDs which always helps when you're preparing a fashion show. At 3am everyone likes to hear some Dolly Parton - that's always a winner - and I'll never forget Miuccia [Prada] spinning round to Kylie.' But seriously? Obviously she must have a great eye, but what else? 'I suppose I've got a certain point of view that people like. And I'm crazy about shoes and bags and want every look to have a bag, and I love working with people on design. And I'm really quick at cutting to the chase. A lot of creative people tend to overthink and procrastinate and need to analyse things, and when you're working with big designers and you've got a show next Sunday, you have to say, "I like that, don't like that, let's do that, let's do it in grey".' In addition, I would guess, she is valued for her energy, her puppyish enthusiasm, her willingness to give other people the credit and the fact that she is fun to be around.

Her obsession with fashion started when she was 12, and her father brought her Vogue and The Face to read when she was ill in bed. 'I was really nerdy. And then kind of overnight I can remember clearly thinking, "I just want to be cool".' She grew up in Birmingham where her father was a research scientist at the university (the only Birmingham university scientist, she says, to wear Jil Sander) and her mother was a primary-school teacher. They separated when she was seven - her mother went to hospital to have some cartilage removed and never came back - and Grand stayed with her father, though she still saw her mother every day after school.

She failed her 11-plus - 'I was always useless at exams' - and went to 'quite a rough school where everyone was very kind of street-savvy so you end up with a bit of that. And my dad was very liberal and used to let boys sleep over, so me and my friend Jo were very social from quite a young age.' Her father meanwhile had a succession of girlfriends but eventually settled with one called Dianne, who encouraged Katie's interest in fashion and took her on shopping trips to London. 'I was quite relieved when he settled with Dianne - though for the first few months when she moved in, I kind of smashed lots of things.'

She also stopped eating. 'From 15 to 25 I didn't really eat much. I just wanted to be thinner, but I couldn't get under eight stone no matter what I did. I would eat two tablespoons of muesli a day with two tablespoons of water - I still can't eat muesli to this day. And then I'd maybe have two fruit pastilles about five, and then three satsumas and on a really bad day I'd have a banana. I can remember meals I had during those years because they were so rare.' And - presumably because of the extreme diet - she has never had periods, ever. But that doesn't matter, she says, because she has never wanted to have children. She has been with her boyfriend Steve Mackey for 10 years but 'he doesn't want to get married and I don't want to have children'. As the only child of two only children, she is adamant that the Grand line stops with her.

When she was 17, she wrote to Liz Tilberis, the editor of Vogue, asking how she could become editor one day. Tilberis advised her to go to Saint Martins so she went on an art foundation course at Bournville, Birmingham, where she was student of the year, and on to Saint Martins, where she made good friends with Stella McCartney and Giles Deacon. But she found the course disappointing and was happy to drop out when she met the photographer Rankin. He asked her to come and help on a magazine he was doing called Eat Me, and then on Dazed & Confused, which he started with Jefferson Hack. She says she learnt a lot from Rankin: 'He's very positive and he always had that mentality of do-it-yourself rather than work for someone else. That spirit of Oh let's just do it, let's have an exhibition, let's start a magazine.' They had an affair for a year or so, but she carried on working for Dazed & Confused for seven years, with no budget, no salary, but limitless opportunities to learn, and to show off her talents as a stylist.

Her big commercial breakthrough came when the Italian leather goods house Bottega Veneta decided they wanted to give themselves 'more of a fashion edge' and hired her to revamp their image. She got Giles Deacon to design for them, and 'We made a big splash with the fashion shows and BV was talked about as being this very cool label all of a sudden, and that brought me to the attention of Mrs Prada, who said, "Come and do something fun for me". It was an amazing opportunity and I think that was when people started talking about me as a stylist.'

Miuccia Prada, she says reverently, is the most inspiring person she's ever worked for. 'She is so bright, so smart, and so good at her job. Any suggestion she ever made would always make something so much better. She's just an amazingly smart woman with impeccable taste.' So why did Katie stop working for her? 'She stopped working with me, unfortunately. I think she got bored with me. I was due to go and shoot the Miu Miu campaign and I got a phone call saying they'd decided to use a different stylist. So I cried a bit. I still see her socially and still adore her and she's always very sweet to me, but I think she was bored. She kind of gets over people. But it's just horribly upsetting to be at the receiving end.'

Meanwhile, Emap, now Bauer, (Heat, Grazia, FHM) had lured Katie from Dazed & Confused to be fashion director of The Face in 1999, with the promise that she could eventually start her own magazine. She launched POP in 2000 and it made money right from the start, largely because it had such low overheads, whereas The Face quietly expired under the weight of its own payroll (it had 25 staff at one point). Katie chose to put almost all her budget into production and very little into salaries - she used to joke that she was the lowest-paid person at Emap. 'But I'd much rather keep the standard high as it is, than that I got paid more. That's how we get everyone to shoot for us - because the printing is beautiful. Often the photographers are using their own money, so you feel you owe it to them to print as well as possible.' And bright young things flock to work for POP for peanuts because they know it will look good on their CVs and eventually translate into the sort of grand-a-minute advertising gigs that will pay their mortgages.

Last year Mulberry tried to hire Katie Grand as creative director and she had a long think about it but in the end decided that, 'when push came to shove, it didn't feel like the right thing for me to do, because I never felt I was particularly good at design. I love working with people who are very very talented - Marc [Jacobs] is amazing, Giles [Deacon] is amazing, Miuccia [Prada] of course is amazing - they're just so much better than I am. I recognised at art school that I might be adequate - but there's a ton of adequate designers out there. And the problem for designers like Giles is that the actual designing, the fun bit, is probably less than 10 per cent of how they spend their day. Whereas the stylist can come in and just create this whirlwind - "Ooh, can we do it in red?" - and then you leave. So I always thought being a stylist was a much better job!'

But her first love is still magazines. She has abandoned her initial ambition to become editor of Vogue, because 'I realised a couple of years ago that, much as I love Vogue and W, the kind of magazines that are closest to my heart are the style magazines, like The Face, i-D, Interview. I find Interview magazine really inspiring - not that I'm comparing myself to Andy Warhol! - and I suppose I want to build POP into something equally iconic, with covers people remember.'

What else, apart from that? Does she have any wild ambitions? 'Ooh, that's hard. I'd love to meet the Queen! I keep saying to Giles if ever you get an OBE, I'd better be coming with you!' No, seriously, what does she dream of doing? 'I don't know. That's a really hard question. You know when you're in your twenties and working out what you want to do with your life, you say OK, by the time I'm 30 I'd like to work for Prada, edit a magazine, buy a house - and I ticked all those boxes quite quickly. But during my thirties I suppose I've solidified what I started in my twenties and I want to just carry on working with nice people doing nice things. I'm not unhappy with what I'm doing. But I really don't know.'